"Every major release of the 4.x series of Xfce has been pretty major. 4.0 was the result of over a years work, a major rewrite of the entire desktop. 4.2 saw the introduction of major features and enhancements that were incomplete for 4.0, and new developers as Xfce4 gained popularity. 4.4 is going to be a major upgrade to Xfce, with new components, major upgrades to old ones, and more tools for developers. So, without further ado, let's take a look at what's coming."

There was an initiative that could have delivered something like this. The project was named [url=http://mockup.org/]Mockup[/url], but was canceled (IIRC) when the author joined Novell. This was supposed to be a BeOS inspired desktop based on the Linux kernel, X11 and Qt 4. It wasn't developed as a pure DE however. It was supposed to be a complete system, with the base modified from a standard Linux system, I never quite catched why though.

Creating a non-bloated Qt desktop could be a good idea. I don't quite agree with the other replier, who says the DE market is full. There's always room for creating something better, it just takes alot of effort to get a new DE to a usable state. There's always people that argue that this effort is better spent supporting GNOME/KDE, but isn't that a bit like telling everybody to support Windows?